5/23/2009

WHEN WE HAND THEM TO YOU

B. McGILLICUDDY

There were three pirates who sometimes buried treasure, but not always. In the event that they were not burying treasure, they would spend it on things. Like rum. Other times they would invest it in local taverns, in order to get free rum whenever they wanted. And even other times, they would spend it on loose women or women that actually considered themselves prostitutes. One day, one of the pirates was very sleepy and had just tried mescaline for the first time, so he wasn’t at all interested in the prostitute he had leased for the evening. So he tried to send her away, but neglected to pay her, so she stayed. ‘Why are you still here?’ He asked her. ‘Because you haven’t given me my bloody money you scally-shank-wizzle.’ She replied. He checked his purse and noticed that he was low on doubloons, so he pulled out his pistol. She stood there with a look of expectation on her face. He pulled out some gun powder from a hollowed-out cow horn he had attached to his belt and poured it into the muzzle of his pistol. Then he tamped it down a little while the prostitute started shifting from her right hip to her left hip and placed her fist onto it. Her face was slowly changing to a look of disbelief. The pirate rolled a single bullet into the pistol, cocked it, aimed it at the prostitute and said, ‘Genevieve, I love you doll, but I’m going to shoot you in your heart if you don’t leave before I finish this sentence.’ Then he shot at her left bosom, but missed, because of the mescaline, the rum, his being tired, and the inaccuracy of the gun, and the bullet hit her right bosom and got lodged between her third and fourth ribs.